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“... land of contrasts. He introduces readers to the age Jane Austen was born into: ‘The age of Rowlandson and the age of Gainsborough’, an age of ‘militant patriotism’ and of ‘laxity and licence’, etc, etc. It is no doubt this rubbish that makes the blurb feel entitled to speak of Professor Halperin’s ‘command of the contemporary ...”

“... Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the ...”

“... while outside the streets fill up with individuals, faces and bodies caricatured but recognisable. Rowlandson and Gilray made the crowd visible just as it became increasingly audible in pamphlets and broadsheets of the kind that Johnson published. The nameless dead of Gray’s country churchyard had come to town and no longer led entirely hidden lives.Hay ...”